That's a red squirrel, busy rummaging in its refrigerator.
Thursday, 28 February 2013
Wednesday, 27 February 2013
This interview (via Balloon Juice) gives quite a bit of food for thought about what might be happening in American labor markets. It steps past the usual assumptions of the god-from-the-machine economics where the markets are just assumed to be competitive and where all participants are assumed to have perfect information about everything.
But in reality someone hiring a worker has very little real knowledge about that worker's skills. There's always a risk in hiring someone, because that person might turn out not to be sufficiently skilled, whatever the original paperwork and interviews might suggest.
The interview (with Peter Cappelli) is about something slightly different, viz. the idea that firms no longer want to do much on-the-job-training. I'm not sure what the data shows about this, but Cappelli's basic ideas are intuitively appealing:
He argues that the so-called skills gap in the United States (between what workers can do and what firms need them to do) is nowhere near as large as it is touted to be. Rather, firms in the past hired people and then trained them for the job. Now they want the workers to come ready-trained.
That would explain the recent trend of firms refusing to even look at those applicants who are unemployed. Perhaps their skills have already rusted?
Though an alternative explanation works, too: The labor markets are still the buyers' markets so firms can be as picky as they wish.
And that alternative explanation also accounts for the reduced willingness on the firms' behalf to train workers. Why bother doing that if you can find people who are already trained at the same wage rate?
But hold your horses. There's something else going on, because if those well-trained people are willing to work at fairly low wages, why can't firms find them?
And then we know that employers are basically not paying very much, so if you are the least bit economically oriented, then you say ‘ok, they can’t find what they want, but they’re not willing to raise their prices (wages in this case) so gee, that’s not a surprise.’Cappelli proposes that firms are artificially narrowing the supply of labor they consider so that only those who are a perfect fit need apply. But that narrow segment of the market will not take the jobs at the low wages the firms are offering. Hence the paradox of a buyers' labor market where the buyers cannot find what they search for.
I'm not sure what's going on here within the usual framework of a labor market. It could be that the markets are not clearing. It could be that the particular market Cappelli has in mind has few large firms buying the labor, and those firms have market power to set wages and to restrict employment. Or it could be that the ordinary market framework fails to explain the kind of limited rationality that underlies employment decisions.
That's what Justice Scalia of the Supremes called the Voting Rights Act. The Guardian story I link to tells more about the reasons for that astonishing comment. Well, astonishing to anyone living in the real world where racial entitlement mostly goes in the opposite direction.
The basic conservative argument is that the disease (Southern laws and other attempts to make it harder for blacks to vote) have been cured and the remedy should no longer be administered.
If we take that medical approach seriously, the obvious step is to establish whether the disease in fact has been cured. Are there no attempts to make voting harder in minority areas, for example?
Because Google co-founder tells us this:
Google co-founder Sergey Brin on Wednesday described his misgivings with smartphones, saying that using them makes him feel less manly.
During a speech at the TED Conference in Long Beach, Calif., Brin called smartphones "emasculating."
"You're standing around and just rubbing this featureless piece of glass," Brin said of smartphones, according to CNET. Brin talked about his company's head-mounted device, known as Google Glass, that has been set up to compete with smartphones.
Eeeek! What's happening to mah testosterone??? And what's happening to me, a female goddess, if I'm further emasculated? My masculinity feels so fragile and vulnerable already. Better go out to have beer, fart, burp and kick some ass, right? Or grab some ass.
Tuesday, 26 February 2013
Ross Douthat seldom fails to give me (unhealthy) food for my blogging, and his last column is no different. Ross sounds like a Victorian preacher in most of it, at least the sort of a Victorian preacher I imagine: A stern patriarchal figure regarding the poor as immoral children, in need of the preacher's ability to interpret the divine will when it comes to the poor, but without any direct experience of the lives of the poor.
It's fun. Douthat begins by stating that despite all the science-fiction ideas about the future of unlimited leisure time, what we have now is an upside-down world where the rich work hard and the poor do not. That's the first fib in his story: Most poor people work, many work very hard, and there are rich people who don't lift a finger, except to have it manicured by someone else.
A slight exaggeration, but you should get my point: Douthat exaggerates in the other direction. He also assumes that only the work that is compensated with money is real work.
Anyway, the column continues like this, about the vast riches of the United States:
Those riches mean that we can probably find ways to subsidize — through public means and private — a continuing decline in blue-collar work. Many of the Americans dropping out of the work force are not destitute: they’re receiving disability payments and food stamps, living with relatives, cobbling together work here and there, and often doing as well as they might with a low-wage job. By historical standards their lives are more comfortable than the left often allows, and the fiscal cost of their situation is more sustainable than the right tends to admits. (Medicare may bankrupt us, but food stamps probably will not.)So if the available jobs are no better than scrounging in the garbage tips or living off relatives, why bother? In any case, people used to starve to death so what does the left complain about? And we can afford the food stamps and the garbage dump sources of food.
Here's the thing which made me think of that mythical Victorian out-of-touch preacher: The column tells us nothing about what happened to those blue-collar jobs, nothing about why real wages are not rising but rather declining, nothing about multinational corporations, outsourcing and so on. All these things just are, and the only thing Ross bemoans is that they might be bad for the morals and morale of the poor.
Monday, 25 February 2013
Seth MacFarlane sang "We Saw Your Boobs" at the Oscars of 2013 where he hosted the event. You can listen to and watch the performance here.
A catchy song, and MacFarlane is not too bad at singing it. I sat mesmerized expecting the bit where he would sing "But We Did Not See Your Willies." You know, with the same listing of movies and the actors in them. For each woman whose boobs were seen, give me a guy whose willie was not seen in a movie.
Because that would have been hootingly hilarious! Well I think so.
Of course humor is in the eye of the beholder, like a mote or a beam, to mix my metaphors. And it may well be, as these gentlemen tell us, that humor is meant to be goofy or edgy or subversive:
- Seth Rogen and Andy Samberg, from the more Hollywood insider of comic camps, qualified their comments, insisting that hosting an awards show can be difficult, and that MacFarlane's schtick was about being weird than anything mean. Rogen said: "Good comedy is subversive." Samberg? "I always like the goofier stuff."
Now forget the rest of MacFarlane's performance (which would have been pretty good from any knuckle-dragger) and ask yourself what the meta-joke might be in the Boob Song.
Is it that these serious female actors are defined as mere boob carriers, and that this is why they are watched on the screen? Or is it a deeper joke about the men (I assume it's heterosexual men MacFarlane means by "we") who pay attention to nothing but bare boobs and are very proud of that, the way MacFarlane played it? Or is it even something deeper than that, a synechdoche for women of all types, not just those in the acting business? The way The Onion tweet perhaps implied in that extremely nasty tweet about a child (though a female child) which was removed and for which The Onion apologized?
Nah. I think MacFarlane wanted to shock. That's why the built-in false-angry reactions by a few of the women mentioned in the song. We are supposed to admire his gall at shocking those famous actors and being naughty while doing so. Except that jokes about boobs or talking about boobs or pictures about boobs are not shocking. They are boringly universal and impossible to avoid on the Internet. There's nothing subversive about such jokes. Indeed, they are as traditional as white sliced bread and Miracle Whip.
If there was anything subversive about MacFarlane's whole performance, it was his perseverance, his insistence at sticking it to the female gender in those jokes, and most of them were like white bread with Miracle Whip on top, boring and bland to me. "A woman's innate ability to never let anything go?"
I thought that women could never make up their minds about anything? But perhaps that's for the next time MacFarlane hosts this show. -- The point is, of course, that our Seth saw his audience as hetero guys, pretty much. Perhaps white, hetero guys?
And yes, he was pretty mean to several individual men, too. But not really to the male gender, as far as I could tell. Of course, the default value for an individual is still a man, so it's hard to see what one man does as somehow indicative of all men, though there is little difficulty of drawing conclusions about all women from a handful of female actors.
The really interesting bit about this all is this, by the way :
To an extent, MacFarlane gave the academy exactly what it deserved. (And let’s remember, people, his script was pre-approved, probably by many layers of powerful vetters.)
Friday, 22 February 2013
In Oklahoma, fascinating political stuff about contraception:
Under State Sen. Clark Jolley (R)’s measure, “no employer shall be required to provide or pay for any benefit or service related to abortion or contraception through the provision of health insurance to his or her employees.” According to the Tulsa World, Jolley’s inspiration for his bill came from one of his male constituents who is morally opposed to birth control, and wanted to find a small group insurance plan for himself and his family that didn’t include coverage for those services:The bolds are in the original.
Jolley said the measure is the result of a request from a constituent, Dr. Dominic Pedulla, an Oklahoma City cardiologist who describes himself as a natural family planning medical consultant and women’s health researcher. [...]
Women are worse off with contraception because it suppresses and disables who they are, Pedulla said.
“Part of their identity is the potential to be a mother,” Pedulla said. “They are being asked to suppress and radically contradict part of their own identity, and if that wasn’t bad enough, they are being asked to poison their bodies.”
The bill has already cleared a Senate Health committee and now makes it way to Oklahoma’s full Senate. It is unlikely that either Jolley and Pedulla themselves rely on insurance coverage for hormonal contraceptive services — but if the measure becomes law, the two men could limit the health insurance options for the nearly two million women who live in Oklahoma.
All this made me most eager to meet Dr. Dominic Pedulla. If he is the same doctor Pedulla I've found on the Google, he is the founder of the Edith Stein Foundation.
Who was Edith Stein and what does she have to do with this foundation?
As a brilliant feminist scholar she was able to challenge certain assumptions of the day, arguing for greater involvement of women in the liturgical life of the Church, in the professions, and in the workplace. She was an intellectual leader of the fledgling women’s movement in Germany after World War I. It is a remarkable tribute to her persona that she was able to harmonize these feminist aspirations with her abiding belief that at the deepest core of woman’s personality one will find receptivity and motherhood. Not a ”barefoot and pregnant” reductionist view of motherhood, the kind which sees woman as a passive prisoner of her biology, and slave to her tyrant fertility. Rather, she saw receptivity and motherliness as woman’s unique power, a power capable of transforming a home, workplace, professional environment, country, or society in ways that men cannot.Bolds here are mine. In short, the Edith Stein Foundation is a Catholic Foundation, opposed to contraception and sterilization and pretty much created by Dr. Pedulla. The rest of the leadership consists of two men and one woman, the latter the wife of Dr. Pedulla. How odd that something like a foundation can be just another name for one couple...
One of the prescient original insights was derived from her exegesis of the Genesis biblical narratives as well as from her intuitive analysis of the lived experience of woman. This insight was that procreation would always be a more consuming and psychologically preoccupying concern for the woman. This prophetic analysis anticipated the work of later experts of the psychology of woman, who recognized the procreation and childbearing can be anxiety-provoking challenges to integration in a woman’s life.
We think that if Edith Stein were alive today she would be a zealous promoter of fertility consciousness and appreciation, and would see this issue as an existential core feminist issue. She would see this alternative as the only authentic and empowering way of satisfying modern woman’s fertility-control needs in a way that fulfills also the deepest needs of her person. She would also see contraception and sterilization as a deeply traumatizing form of rejection of woman’s core self. She would see them as debilitating compromises with fear and therefore contrary to reproductive freedom. She would not view contraception and sterilization as liberating technologies, but rather cruel instruments of woman’s personal degradation and enslavement to the will and desires of others.
We therefore look to Edith Stein as patroness of our Foundation and movement. We believe it most fitting that this great feminist and saint inspire all efforts to empower the world’s women in an authentic way in this new millennium. We think her ideas, articulated within the woman’s movement, will have great power to influence the cultural dialogue concerning woman, sexuality, marriage, and family.
The mission of the Edith Stein Foundation:
In 1968, an Italian scholar predicted that if contraception were to become a cultural norm, four things would result: a general lowering of moral standards, an increase in promiscuousness and infidelity, a rise in the disrespect men have for women, and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments. Strikingly, in the more than forty years since that portentous prognosis, all four of these have been realized. Social science not only shows it, but is showing the connection between a contraceptive culture and the social maladies of our day.Thus, fighting for the eradication of contraceptives is the reason why we have this proposal in Oklahoma. Truly fascinating stuff! And think of how much power one man has in getting something like this into the political system!
What’s more, medical research has shown and is continuing to show the far reaching ill effects of all methods of contraception. Not many people have heard about the 1968 predictions, and the growing body of evidence against contraceptives. For the dignity and health of women, this has got to stop. This is where the Edith Stein Foundation comes in to educate, advocate, research, connect, and heal.
Note also the code-word "dignity" in that last quote. It's customarily used by various religions as a replacement for equality when talking about women.
Thursday, 21 February 2013
This I don't get about the US elections: That they are held on a weekday. By doing that, the American system maximizes the costs of voting for all hourly workers, for all those who need transportation (by a friend or a relative) to go to vote and for all who are minding small children.
Why not have elections over the weekend? They can be made two days long and that way nobody's religion should stand in the way. That solution is not complete as there are people who work over the weekends. But it would reduce the costs of voting to many more people.
Wednesday, 20 February 2013
If I could go back to the beginning of my blogging life I would make a few changes. For one, I'd make different blogs for different topics. For another, I'd probably call myself Average Bob or something similar on one of those blogs and Lettuce Prey on another. I could have carried out amateur studies of the impact of one's handle!
Alas, even goddesses cannot go backwards. But I wish I hadn't started to write about everything under the sun or at least far too many areas. When I debate stuff with people it's like fighting enemies on all fronts, ultimately. Very very exhausting. I should have stuck to the areas in which I have decades of study. But of course that is boring.
Here are some interesting things for you to read. Some of them require no extra writing, others I'm too tired to write about, and the first link most of you can't read at all so you must just trust me!
Sweden's stock-market-quoted companies have more men named Johan than all women, whatever their names, in their leadership. (Link is to a yellow Finnish rag paper so take with a ladle of salt without checking).
What is happening in Egypt, as seen through the eyes of one Tom Friedman and the fact that the bellydancing channel there has been closed.
On the age-old question: Are women responsible for how men react to their clothing?
Interesting ideas on how languages might affect our thinking. I have lots more ideas about that based on my bilingual life.
A fascinating story about found photographs and the unknown taker of them: A 1950s nanny.
That "Where Are All The Babies Gone" article made me think of this genre as a whole. With very few exceptions, these pieces discuss the horrible consequences of not enough babies, focusing on "you-are-going-to-die-alone-in-your-own-filth" and "who's going to pay for you when you are old" as the two major be-very-afraid triggers.
But most of them also mention some version of the fear what might happen if liberal women don't start having a lot of children in the United States (conservatives will take over) or if non-Muslim women don't start having a lot of children in Europe (extreme Islamists will take over): If you thought you have something to complain now about sexism and rigid gender roles, just you wait.
Which means that a voluntary return to traditional gender roles is required in order for us to avoid a compulsory return to those gender roles.
All of that is naturally aimed at the hidden (but very real) assumption that it is the selfishness of women which is causing all this. Women must stop being so selfish because either liberalism or the white race or the Western Civilization will die if they don't. That the solution sorta resembles the death of liberalism or the death of modernity for women is not a part of those articles.
I put it all in somewhat sharper terms than any of the articles I've read does, just so that you can see what I mean. The basic setup means that we will NOT look at certain solutions.
For example, if the lower fertility rates are because people are too selfish, the only clear solution is for them to stop being so selfish! An article which digs more deeply into that question might ask what other reasons people might have for not procreating than selfishness, and that digging would bring up all the stuff about the United States having no paid parental leave, about the high costs of college in this country, about the nonexistent or very expensive daycare, about women still being assumed to do all the hands-on childcare and so on.
But by positing selfishness as the explanation, very little of that needs to seep into the articles.
Japan is an interesting test case of many of those ideas. Japan pretty much HAS traditional gender roles and that has not helped in raising fertility rates. Indeed, it is those very gender roles which probably cause the low fertility rates, because the Japanese still view mothering as a full-time occupation and because women in the labor force suffer from fewer promotions etc. after they get married.
Likewise, the countries in Europe which experience the greatest birth dearth are Catholic countries in the south and Germany. What those share are traditional assumptions about how mothering should be carried out. One study noticed that a very large number of Italian men has never operated a washing machine. And another pointed out that mothers who don't dedicate themselves sufficiently to their children are called Raven Mothers in Germany.
I find this all very interesting! Women are selfish (all people, yes, but mostly women) and should stop being so selfish. That's the solution, and the motivation is linked to a certain kind of far-future society or one's own hypothesized suffering in old age. And there the conclusions pretty much end.
But if we asked WHY women don't have more children we could get solutions which actually work. For instance, those guys writing books about this could start daycare facilities! They could lobby for better parental leave! They could lobby for lower college costs! They could really change the world rather than complaining about it in a way which costs themselves nothing.
Tuesday, 19 February 2013
Do you know how much Facebook paid in federal and state income taxes in 2012? Assuming this article has it right a total of zero dollars:
It’s good to be a corporation in America. Despite making $1.1 billion after going public last year, Facebook didn’t pay a dime in state or federal income taxes in 2012. Instead, thanks to the social media company’s use of a single tax break—the tax deductibility of executive stock options—it anticipates getting a massive refund from the government totaling $429 million.I don't know if that $1.1 billion is profit or revenue. But this is interesting information in any case. It's like that saw about financial markets being too big to fail in that now firms can be too big to pay taxes.
But taxes are (ideally) the cost we pay for the infrastructure, the police, the firefighters, the public health services and so on. They are the price of civilization, and watching large firms get away without paying their fair share also gnaws on the ties that bind us to each other. Because the outcome is unfair.
At the Daily Beast. The article is about:
Sitting around a table at a hookah bar in New York’s East Village with three women and a gay man, all of them in their 20s and 30s and all resolved to remain childless, a few things quickly became clear: First, for many younger Americans and especially those in cities, having children is no longer an obvious or inevitable choice. Second, many of those opting for childlessness have legitimate, if perhaps selfish, reasons for their decision.Indeed, that opening tells you almost everything you need to know about this article. It's about the baby dearth and the selfishness of those who don't have children. It's also about who's-gonna-pay-for-you-when-you-are-old:
As younger Americans individually eschew families of their own, they are contributing to the ever-growing imbalance between older retirees—basically their parents—and working-age Americans, potentially propelling both into a spiral of soaring entitlement costs and diminished economic vigor and creating a culture marked by hyperindividualism and dependence on the state as the family unit erodes.So. The family will be in the dustbin of the history and nobody will take care of all the elderly. But note that the women who in the past had many children and stayed at home taking care of them tended to be the poorest in old age because of the way retirement benefits are calculated. I'm pointing that one out because the article tends to ignore all the costs to women in the various alternatives.Crudely put, the lack of productive screwing could further be screwing the screwed generation.
Lest you haven't been scared enough by now, the authors also suggest that:
What's quite funny about that quote is that the very large families of some of the fundamentalist sects are made possible with the help of the government. And note that stick (rather than carrots) in the last sentence: If the liberal young people don't breed more then they will get rigid traditional gender roles back!In the long run, notes Eric Kaufmann, the author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, high birthrates among such conservative, religious populations as Mormons and evangelical Christians will slant our politics against the secular young, childless voting bloc as well. Even among generally liberal groups like Jews, the most religious are vastly out-birthing their secular counterparts; by some estimates roughly two in five New York Jews are Orthodox—as are three in four of the city’s Jewish children. If these trends continue, and if these children share their parents’ politics—two big ifs, to be sure—even the Democratic stronghold of Gotham will be pulled rightward.This prospect would pose dangers to our society as a whole, and singletons in particular, including a potential reversion to a more rigidly traditionalist worldview.
The authors then mention a few countries with lower fertility rates than the United States. Germany and Japan, in particular.
You know, I'm always grateful for Japan having such a low fertility rate, not because I don't care about Japan, but because Japan is not a feminist country. Neither are Italy or Spain terribly feminist places but they are also places with very low fertility rates. Of course what all those three countries share are pretty "rigid traditionalist worldviews" when it comes to sexual division of child care tasks. In short, they are not divided at all but fall to the woman. This means her costs have risen in a world where two incomes may be necessary.
What are the solutions to this Baby Dearth, then? Joel and Harry tell us:
There are several steps our government could take that might mitigate postfamilialism without aspiring to return to some imagined “golden age” of traditional marriage and family. These include such things as reforming the tax code to encourage marriage and children; allowing continued single-family home construction on the urban periphery and renovation of more child-friendly and moderate-density urban neighborhoods; creating extended-leave policies that encourage fathers to take more time with family, as has been modestly successfully in Scandinavia; and other actions to make having children as economically viable, and pleasant, as possible. Men, in particular, will also have to embrace a greater role in sharing child-related chores with women who, increasingly, have careers and interests of their own.
Perhaps those "other actions" only hinted at include good quality daycare, longer maternity leaves, less financial punishment (in terms of lowered future earnings and retirement incomes) for women who either take time off from the labor force or work part-time. Perhaps those "other actions" might be doing something about college costs which can now average $40,000 per year? Or the expectation in this country that all parents should support their children through college?
In short, having children in the United States is expensive and has little concrete support from the society. At the same time, mothering, as defined in various popular media articles, has almost become an extreme sport: All-consuming and never sufficient. No wonder if young women hesitate to join those races. Incidentally, this article isn't alone in trying to turn people off parenting. Neither is it alone in that definition of parenting problems as purely individual ones.
Not all of the Kotkin-Siegel article is bad or wrong. But I find it astonishing that one important aspect of the whole question is simply omitted, or replaced by stories about young women in a hookah bar. And yes, we can question whether lower fertility rates indeed might not be the best solution to what is ailing Mother Earth. As I've mentioned before, it would be hard to bring all people to a high standard of living (and leave some place for the rest of nature) without reducing the number of people on this earth.
I had to hover near the computer, waiting for something to finish, so I went to I fucking love science. It has a story about Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, with this picture:
Oops, I thought.
If you don't get why I thought that way, go and read the comments attached to the post. Or a sample of them. That's what I did. And then I read all the 2944 comments that were posted at the time.
Here's the fun fact: Three percent of those comments consist of some version of the "get back into the kitchen and make me a sammitch, biatch" joke.
Monday, 18 February 2013
I must scratch my head over these Republican boys' antics. Here's the recent joke column at the National Review by Michael Walsh:
Nevertheless, you’re on to something I’ve been advocating for years now. And that is the repeal of all four of the so-called “Progressive Era” amendments, including the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th, which were passed between 1911 and 1920.
The income-tax amendment was a self-evident attack on capitalism and led to the explosive growth of the federal government we currently enjoy today. (Without it, there’d be no need for a Balanced Budget Amendment.) Direct elections of senators has given us, among other wonders, the elevation of John F. Kerry to, now, secretary of state. Prohibition was directly responsible for the rise of organized crime and its unholy alliance with the big-city Democratic machines. And women’s suffrage . . . well, let’s just observe that without it Barack Obama could never have become president. Time for the ladies to take one for the team.
Who’s with me?
A party which is currently known best for supporting rapists' fatherhood rights and for demanding vaginal ultrasounds before abortions and for trying to block the VAWA then comes out with public jokes about how women's suffrage should be abolished?
They couldn't be clearer about their views if they erected a banner over their headquarters saying No GURLZ Allowed. Well, that was overly nice of me. The banner would say something like "bitches are dumb, women are inferior, and egg Americans rule."
But I think Michael Walsh is dumb. Or rather blind and deaf and living in a little locker-room bubble rather than in the real world. Because what his joking tells us is that he thinks it would be easier to ban women from voting than to change those things about his party platform which are against most women's interests. But perhaps the Republicans have figured out that if they have the money boys and the fundies, all they need are the misogynists, and this might be part of the courting of those haters.
To put things into some perspective, I have never read a Democratic pundit or politician proposing the abolition of male suffrage, even though that, too, would benefit one party. That the Republicans have done the reverse several times tells us something.
(The "meanwhile, in x" posts are about negative news concerning women's lives in various places. )
Content Warning: Violence, Sexual Violence
These news explain why laws which treat men and women differently can create horrible outcomes:
First, the couple was divorced and the father had automatic control of the child. The mother asked him for custody but he refused, and that was that.
Second, the way the Saudi clerics interpret shariah, a father killing his child cannot be considered an ordinary murderer:
I'm not an expert and therefore don't know why the alternative is a few months in prison and the payment of blood money (half of the amount that would be given in the case of the killing of a son), but the first linked article states that the same principle applies to husbands killing their wives, even though he cannot be the origin of her.
Those rulings create bad incentives. Why not just kill a troublesome wife rather than divorce her? They also give a green light to extreme forms of pedophile violence as long as the perpetrator only attacks his own children.
Activists in Saudi Arabia have raised objections to the ruling. I was unable to find English-language news stories about general reactions and what most people thought about the ruling.
Content Warning: Violence, Sexual Violence
These news explain why laws which treat men and women differently can create horrible outcomes:
- Religious scholar "sentenced to pay blood money to mother after serving short jail term" for daughter's death.
- A Saudi man who raped his five-year-old daughter and tortured her to death has been sentenced to pay "blood money" to the mother after having served a short jail term, according to activists.
- The man, said to be a religious scholar who is also a regular guest on Islamic television networks, confessed to having used cables and a cane to inflict the injuries, activists from the group Women to Drive said in a statement on Saturday.
- Lamia was admitted to hospital on December 25, 2011, with multiple injuries, including a crushed skull, broken ribs and left arm, extensive bruising and burns, the activists said.
- They said the father had doubted his daughter Lama's virginity and had her checked up by a medic.
First, the couple was divorced and the father had automatic control of the child. The mother asked him for custody but he refused, and that was that.
Second, the way the Saudi clerics interpret shariah, a father killing his child cannot be considered an ordinary murderer:
As for fathers, the matter is different; a father cannot be executed for killing his child. This is because a father is the considered the origin of his child and the child is the branch; and the branch cannot be used to eliminate the origin.
It was narrated that the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “No father should be killed (executed) for killing his son.” (At-Tirmidhi)
Having said this, it should be also pointed out that Imam Malik has a different opinion: if a father kills his son definitely on purpose without any doubt, he may be executed.
Allah Almighty knows best.
I'm not an expert and therefore don't know why the alternative is a few months in prison and the payment of blood money (half of the amount that would be given in the case of the killing of a son), but the first linked article states that the same principle applies to husbands killing their wives, even though he cannot be the origin of her.
Those rulings create bad incentives. Why not just kill a troublesome wife rather than divorce her? They also give a green light to extreme forms of pedophile violence as long as the perpetrator only attacks his own children.
Activists in Saudi Arabia have raised objections to the ruling. I was unable to find English-language news stories about general reactions and what most people thought about the ruling.
Sunday, 17 February 2013
Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) today:
During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Graham suggested that the sequester’s across-the-board cuts to federal spending, including about a roughly 7.5 percent reduction in military spending, would be “destroying the military.” But rather than agree to President Obama’s proposed alternatives to the sequester, the South Carolina Republican said we should save money by eliminating health care for the 30 million people covered by the Affordable Care Act:Bolds are in the original. Here's that fun picture of the US military spending:
CHRIS WALLACE: Let me just ask you one more question about the sequestration before we let you go, Senator. You know if we go into the sequester, the president is going to hammer Republicans, the White House already put out a list of all the things, terrible things that will happen if a sequester kicks in, 70,000 children losing Head Start. 2100 fewer food inspectors and small business will lose $900 million in loan guarantees and you know, Senator, the president will say your party is forcing this to protect tax cuts for the wealthy.
GRAHAM: Well, all i can say is the commander-in-chief thought — came up with the idea of sequestration, destroying the military and putting a lot of good programs at risk. It is my belief — take Obamacare and put it on the table. You can make $86,000 a year in income and still get a government subsidy under Obamacare. Obamacare is destroying health care in this country and people are leaving the private sector, because their companies cannot afford to offer Obamacare and if you want to look at ways to find $1.2 trillion in savings over the next decade, look at Obamacare, don’t destroy the military and cut blindly across the board. There are many ways to do it but the president is the commander-in-chief and on his watch we’ll begin to unravel the finest military in the history of the world, at a time when we need it most. The Iranians are watching us, we are allowing people to be destroyed in Syria, and i’m disappointed in our commander-in-chief.
Somehow I don't think that a 7.5% cut in the budgeted amounts for defense would destroy the US military.
I tried to find that reference to $86,000. Perhaps I didn't search hard enough, because this is the closest I found to it:
- For example, a family of four earning just below $88,000, or 400 percent of the poverty level, will receive about $5,000 in annual subsidies to purchase insurance in 2016. Once that threshold is crossed, the subsidy immediately drops to zero. So for a family of four in that income range, a raise in wages would actually result in a significant reduction in take-home pay.
And it turns out that there’s a problem there. Whereas many welfare and government programs take into account the number of people involved in a household, Obamacare does not. Analysts testifying before Congress yesterday discussed the disincentives:??? The two appear to contradict each other, despite the fact that the latter links to the former. I'm too tired to figure that one out. Perhaps you can do so in the comments.
“The way this bill is structured, there are disincentives for women to marry and disincentives for women to work,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
“Two singles would each be able to earn $43,000 and still receive help to purchase health insurance, but if they got married and combined their earnings to $86,000, they would be far above the limit,” Furchtgott-Roth explained. So those with that much income as a couple would lose the government subsidies and be on their own for thousands of dollars in health coverage.
Friday, 15 February 2013
President Obama's universal pre-school program suggestion has provoked much discussion. The impact of pre-school on later success in life is a research field I have not followed, but this article suggests that there are proven benefits for lower-income children:
The Perry Preschool Study has one of the furthest-reaching data sets on this. In the early '60s, the experimenters placed 123 poor black students in Chicago into either a preschool program or no preschool. They have been tracking this group for more than 40 years.
In striking ways, the achievements of those in the preschool program exceeded those who did not attend.
The article points out that the benefits are unlikely to be equally large for children who come from higher-income families, at least if we define benefits the way that study did. One might be able to make a case that some of the benefits could be societal in ways which are hard to capture in concrete numbers.
Another, much larger 25-year study showed similar findings. In a group of 1,400 low-income children, those who had been exposed to preschool at age 3 were 9 percent more likely to have graduated from high school and were 22 percent less likely to have been arrested by age 28.
Preschool has also been shown to enhance IQ in disadvantaged children by 4 points or more.
A different argument for pre-k universality has to do with the possibility that it benefits parents:
- I'm not sure what research has or has not been done on this topic, but here are some fascinating things. A 2011 report from UC Berkeley's Labor Center on the "Economic Impacts of Early Care and Education in California" highlighted some important points. Having access to a dedicated, high-quality preschool can reduce absenteeism and turnover for working parents. Child care arrangements often break down, usually on short notice, which causes work absences as well as other problems. Headaches over child care issues can reduce productivity.
Then we can also step in the hornet's nest of asking how the right would respond to such proposals. My guess is that they would be very opposed. We are not supposed to depend on the government. Mothers are supposed to home-school children and fathers are supposed to pay for that.
What's fascinating about that is that it conflicts with their demands for greater fertility (at least by white American women). France, for instance, started early schooling in part to provide women the kind of help which would allow them to have more children.
These are disjointed musings. My apologies for that. I think universal pre-school is a much better use of funds than unending wars, in any case.
This is a hilarious example of the kind of stuff one usually read on the MRA sites.
It mixes cocktail-party evolutionary psychology (men are hard-wired to be good at tech, women not, without any evidence provided on that hard-wiring), language from the pickup guys (beta males don't get the women*) and the idea that masculinity means telling women to f**k off when they ask for fairer representation or whatever. If you don't have the guts to dominate women you are not a real man!
And the reason these "beta males" do all this is to get laid. But Real Women want a rough alpha male so the strategy will not work.
So it's useful to read that to see the arguments the opposition uses, sorta. But it's also useful to note that if one is like this author and believes that women are just not hard-wired for tech, then that person would probably not treat men and women equally as individuals when applying for tech jobs. He (or she) would add a bit of weight to the guy's application.
Of such circles are these questions about discrimination manufactured!
The piece also does the usual He-Woman thing: The very few exceptional women need no help because they are so obviously good enough. The rest? Meh. How those few exceptional women got the wrong hard-wiring is not explained, either.
To counteract that story, have a look at this survey:
Science savvy female teens in Asia, east and south Europe and the Middle East represent their gender well. These ladies, on average, outperform their male counterparts on science tests for comprehension. In the United States, however, women still lag behind men in science achievement. Only Colombia and Liechtenstein exhibit a higher gap between the genders than the U.S., where boys performed 2.7 percent higher than girls, the New York Times shows (with an interactive plot).
Sixty-five developed countries took part in the test, which was given to 15-year-old students. In the majority of countries, girls dominated. The U.S., plus a handful of countries mostly in west north Europe and the Americas, showed the opposite trend.
Finally a study (which I have not read) suggests that it matters whether parents praise children for what they do or for what they are. The latter leads to less self-confidence when facing challenges later. Girls are more often praised for what they are, rather than for what they do:
Researchers in this study videotaped more than fifty 1- to 3-year-olds and their parents during everyday interactions at home (the families represented a variety of races, ethnicities, and income levels). Each family was taped three times, when children were 1, 2, and 3. From the tapes, researchers identified instances in which parents praised their children and classified that praise as process praise (emphasizing effort, strategies, or actions, such as "You're doing a good job"), person praise (implying that children have fixed, positive qualities, such as "You're so smart"), or all other types of praise.
The researchers followed up with the children five years later when they were 7- to 8-year-olds, and gauged whether the children preferred challenging versus easy tasks, could figure out how to overcome setbacks, and believed that intelligence and personality traits can be developed (as opposed to being fixed).
When parents used more process praise while interacting with their children at home, children reported more positive approaches to challenges five years later, could think of more strategies to overcome setbacks, and believed that their traits could improve with effort. The other two types of praise (person praise and other praise) were not related to children's responses, the study found, nor was the total amount of praise.
Moreover, although boys and girls received the same amount of praise overall, boys got significantly more process praise than girls. And five years later, boys were more likely to have positive attitudes about academic challenges than girls and to believe that intelligence could be improved, according to the study.
Correlation is not necessarily causation, of course.
What these three stories share is the question of fixed characteristics. The first rant argues that men are innately superior in tech, the second story offers some evidence which contradicts that and the third study offers one hypothesis how children may start believing that their abilities are fixed quantities.
-----
*The term beta males comes from wolves. But actual wolf packs in the wild are largely family units and the alpha male is the granddad or dad of most of the pack.
The gross gender gap in earnings between women and men working full-time increased in 2012, I read:
As the Obama administration puts increased focus on paycheck fairness this week, news that the gender pay gap has widened over the past 12 months hits us doubly hard. According to new numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2012 full-time employed women earned just 80.9% of the salaries their male counterparts did, down more than a full percentage point from 2011 when the number hovered over 82%.
To put the dip in perspective, this means the pay gap now is as wide as it has been since 2005, meaning six years of progress have arguably been decimated in one afternoon’s data release. But coming in the heels of the recent State of the Union Address, it just might be good news.
I'm not sure that it is good news, and I'm not sure why the gender gap increased after decreasing, and need to do more research on that. But what angered me about this piece was the quoted comment by Sabrina Schaeffer, one of the ladies from the Independent Women's Forum which is financed by wingnut guys:
Once again President Obama uses the State of the Union to try to mislead women about their prospects in the workforce and to try to expand government in ways that will make jobs even more scarce. The President uses a statistic that every honest analyst knows is misleading to attempt to convince women that our workplace is inherently sexist and that women are all victims. This isn’t good for women, and it’s certainly not appropriate for a serious policy debate.
Making the disparity appear the greatest, the White House uses a distorted snapshot to compare the earnings of the median full-time working man and woman, ignoring the many factors that we know influence how much someone earns.
Throughout life women and men make different life decisions about what college major to select, what line of work they desire, and how much they want to work, which drives differences in earnings—not discrimination.
Why my anger? Not because Schaeffer points out that the gross earnings gap between genders is not a good measure of discrimination. She is quite correct in that. The proper measure can be found after controlling for all those other factors she mentions (though it is often very hard to know what things are "choices" and what things are "constraints"), and that would be the net gender gap in earnings or the part of the gap that cannot be explained by women's choices or women's greater parenting duties or whatever.
But, and this is where my anger comes from: Once all those other things have been controlled for, properly designed studies still find an unexplained earnings difference between men and women who work full-time. And yes, that measure has taken into account whether men work more hours per week and differences in work experience and education and so on, and there are studies which look at only one occupational category which holds constant the possibility that women pick occupations which pay less than men, on average.
So saying that
Throughout life women and men make different life decisions about what college major to select, what line of work they desire, and how much they want to work, which drives differences in earnings—not discrimination.is the same as lying. Not even to mention the fact that the career I "choose" could be very much affected by hearing that there is a lot of harassment against women in it or that I will end up being the token woman in a roomful of men forevermore and so on. In other words, "discrimination" (which has been shown to exist in several studies) can work in forms other than direct face-to-face labor market discrimination.
What's odd about my anger is that it's not based on Schaeffer wanting nothing ever done that might benefit women (and their families) but that she misuses research to make an argument. Or implies that the conclusions are up to one's political views, not the large amounts of economic research actually done.
If you want to learn more about all this, read my three-part gender gap series on the website I link to at the top of this page. The study I look at there is a bit outdated but the principles of how economists do the stuff remain good.
Thursday, 14 February 2013
Some suitable poetry for this day:
Like the very gods in my sight is he who
sits where he can look in your eyes, who listens
close to you, to hear the soft voice, its sweetness
murmur in love and
laughter, all for him. But it breaks my spirit;
underneath my breast all the heart is shaken.
Let me only glance where you are, the voice dies,
I can say nothing,
but my lips are stricken to silence, under-
neath my skin the tenuous flame suffuses;
nothing shows in front of my eyes, my ears are
muted in thunder.
And the sweat breaks running upon me, fever
Shakes my body, paler I turn than grass is;
I can feel that I have been changed, I feel that
death has come near me.
Sappho
Wednesday, 13 February 2013
The book by Betty Friedan, important in American feminism, turns fifty. Menopausal, it is!
I wasn't going to write about the book but decided to do so because of the conversations elsewhere, here and here, and in particular here.
I read The Feminine Mystique a long time ago, right around the same time I read all the books about feminism I could get hold of, including The Second Sex, The Female Eunuch, The Sceptical Feminist, Words and Women, Women: The Longest Revolution, On Women & Revolution, Sexual Politics etcetera etcetera.
Some of those are still worth reading, some have perhaps passed into the annals of history. Later I supplemented those books with works such as In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, The Backlash, The Beauty Myth and so on and so on.
Those titles are picked because I can see them on my shelves from the desk. Others are behind my back and my older books about women are in a different room but those certainly include The Book of the City of Ladies, A Vindication of the Rights of Women and The Subjection of Women as well as my collection of misogynist writings through history.
Why list all those books? To point out that no one book should be treated as the midwife of feminism and neither should any one book be held to such impossibly high standards.
But this is what I see done, to some extent, with The Feminine Mystique. It is criticized for what it omitted, for the terms it used, for its homophobia and for the fact that it covers only the lives of highly educated, white, middle- and upper-class American housewives.
All of these are valid criticisms, true, and the only reason I worry about them is this: I've come to believe that feminist writings are held to higher standards than
Perhaps the reason for that weariness is that the yardstick in this game seems the same perfection that is used for motherhood in the US. But if only a perfect book is good enough, how many of us dare to try?
If I remember correctly, none of the second wave classics exactly matched my own situation or the reasons I turned to feminism. The Feminine Mystique, for example, felt alien to me in that I knew very few housewives and none with higher education, and most of it applied to a foreign culture then. The Second Sex, likewise, applied to a very different world than mine. But I learned things from all of those books and many others. Over time what I learned was used in building my own theories, then later books made me rebuild some parts of the structure, and I expect to go on redesigning this domicile in the future, too. That's what is delicious about learning and about books.
What I learned from The Feminine Mystique was the Power of Naming. That was the take-home message for me, not the rest of the book, even though Friedan's exposition of the way the 1950s media was complicit in the creation of the mystique is very well done and demonstrates sound research.
Indeed, it is the Naming which matters in many of the books I listed. It's almost a diagnosis: You begin with inchoate aches, a feeling that something is wrong. You take your temperature, you wonder about what you have eaten, whether you might have the flu or a stomach bug. You visit your doctor and get a diagnosis. And once you have the diagnosis, you can attend to the illness.
It's not possible before the ailment is Named. Friedan Named one part of the dilemmas American women faced, and others could then address the problem. Naming other parts of the dilemmas was left for later authors. But slowly, over time, we are developing a clearer picture of the whole spectrum of these dilemmas. This allows us to address them. In hopeful theory, at least.
And of course much of what Friedan wrote fifty years ago is now outdated. Isn't that wonderful?!
We no longer get advertisements where Betty next door has whiter laundry than Ann in this house, and Ann is full of jealousy until she goes out and buys some stupid detergent, and we no longer get advertisements where Joe spanks Carol after coming home because Carol had brewed bad coffee. Those were not unheard-of things before Friedan's book.
I'd like to return to the Power of Naming and apply it to this review of Friedan's book. The review itself is well done and interesting. It ends like this:
Feminism opened a million new doors, but our cultural anxiety about and animosity toward women swept right in to create new wormholes of dread just beyond them. We have gained so much, and yet we struggle mightily with all the guilt and pressure that have come with every one of those victories. Five full decades after Friedan sent out the rallying cry for us to be seen as more than just wives and mothers, our president refers to “our wives, mothers and daughters” when addressing the nation as if, when he speaks to the American people, he’s not speaking to wives, mothers and daughters. It’s been 50 years of hard-won battles and gains for women, 50 years of fighting to write for ourselves our place in American culture. So how much has changed since Friedan sent out a flare called “The Feminine Mystique”? Everything. And nothing. And our definition of what it means to be a woman didn’t get easier — it just got impossibly broader.Cultural anxiety about the proper role of women: Yes. Animosity towards women: Oh my, yes and yes and yes! Guilt and pressure: Sure.
But see how that paragraph is screaming for Naming. There it is, that inchoate ache, that high temperature, that feverish brow, and the biggest hint is in the very last words: Our definition of what it means to be a woman just got impossibly broader.
I'm not clever enough to Name this problem but it certainly has much to do with the fact that the new definitions of womanhood have not faded away the old definitions of womanhood. Both are in use, and a woman will fail if she tries to satisfy both definitions. If she chooses to honor only one of those definitions, she will be criticized on the basis of the other definition by at least some people among her acquaintances. So the game is rigged on the level of values.
On a more realistic level, the traditionally female tasks in this world are still seen as traditionally female tasks, whereas many traditionally male tasks are now seen as non-gendered tasks. That's the expansion the linked article might mean when it speaks about broadened definitions of what it means to be a woman.
In practice this is about the second shift, the lack of changes in who does most of the household chores but it is also about the way the public and the private spheres are still kept apart. Anyone who ventures into the latter full-time receives no help for a return trip. Anyone who sticks to the former pays a high price in the loss of non-work related valuable aspects of life. And anyone who tries to dance on the top of the fence separating the two is always at risk of falling off.
These may very well be the problems that only privileged women can think about. But the second shift affects non-privileged women more, and the poorer the woman is the harder the fence-dancing becomes. Child-care costs money, staying at home without a partner who earns enough is impossible. The real solutions cannot be based on individual acts because we no longer live in large kinship groups where help is at least sometimes available. But the societal action we need will not be forthcoming as long as the old and new definitions of what-it-means-to-be-a-woman are both valid currency.
That's the new mystique that has taken the place of Friedan's feminine mystique, I think. And yes, my homeboys, there is a corresponding Masculine Mystique but I leave writing about that to you guys.
Meaning something I don't usually write about, such as sports. I've never wrestled myself but I have worked on strategies against an opponent when on the ground, and I respect what the sport requires. Now the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has decided to remove wrestling from the 2020 Olympic games.
The decision has caused the usual uproar of any sport that is removed, of course, but in this case the sport to be removed is one which was included in the ancient Greek Olympics.
The reasons given? Low television appeal and therefore money, and a need to modernize the games.
Opponents point out that the other sports at risk had friends in the IOC whereas wrestling did not.
The question what sports to have in the games is one I haven't pondered a lot, but if it's the crowding of that two-week period in the Summer Games, why not move some of the indoor events to the Winter Games? Gymnastics, for instance, is usually done indoors and is not dependent on the presence of hot weather etc.
Then to the hilarious comments about the removal of wrestling. I think this one earns the gold medal on those:
According to RT.com, Vladimir Uruimagov, who has coached two Russian Olympic champions in Greco-Roman wrestling, claims that homosexual activists bent on world domination are to blame.No comments necessary, really.
“If they expel wrestling now, that means that gays will soon run the whole world,” Uruimagov told the R-Sport Agency. “It turns out this committee is headed by representatives of these minorities.” “It is necessary for millions around the world to understand that this is a man’s sport and to understand the need to continue the human race to go out and explain their position to the Olympic Committee. We should prove and explain that in any other case there is no future.”
But this one is of some interest, too:
There’s a handful of other sports whose inclusion is just as hard to justify. A few are the exclusive province of the rich, such as equestrian and sailing, and others are just downright silly, such as synchronized swimming and rhythmic gymnastics. Like wrestling, even fans of those sports don’t know all the rules and the scoring is hard to follow. But the same could be said about figure skating, for that matter. Apparently all of them, save wrestling, have enough friends in high places.Downright silly, hmm. Actually, if you think about it, wrestling is downright silly, also, and so are countless other sports. In any case, what is silly is in the eye of the beholder. The beholder I link to finds women's sports silly, by the way.
I'm not a fan of synchronized swimming, mostly because of the outfits and the underlying assumptions on why those are needed, but it's not too hard to see that the sport requires great skills, although not of the same type as, say, wrestling.
And rhythmic gymnastic is the only Olympic sport which is at least partly about great flexibility. I don't see why that is any sillier than having events about great speed or great strength.
Tuesday, 12 February 2013
I've spent an interesting hour or two chasing for one particular quote on Roy Baumeister's ode-to-men, also known as his speech about what so stinks in women, and the quote is this one:
The first big, basic difference has to do with what I consider to be the most underappreciated fact about gender. Consider this question: What percent of our ancestors were women?It’s not a trick question, and it’s not 50%. True, about half the people who ever lived were women, but that’s not the question. We’re asking about all the people who ever lived who have a descendant living today. Or, put another way, yes,every baby has both a mother and a father, but some of those parents had multiple children.Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago.
I think this difference is the single most underappreciated fact about gender. To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.Right now our field is having a lively debate about how much behavior can be explained by evolutionary theory. But if evolution explains anything at all, it explains things related to reproduction, because reproduction is at the heart of natural selection. Basically, the traits that were most effective for reproduction would be at the center of evolutionary psychology.It would be shocking if these vastly different reproductive odds for men and women failed to produce some personality differences.
Guess what this means, in our Roy's mind? That only the successful men were able to breed, whereas almost all women, however poorly equipped, got to breed. The corollary to this is that men are smarter, more adventurous, better at three-dimensional mental rotation and in general the lords of the creation.
Of course that argument ignores the question why these characteristics would not have been inherited by the daughters of those successful men and not just their sons. Our lack of the required genetic knowledge means that Baumeister wouldn't be able to answer that question. Or rather, that the characteristics of intelligence etc would be passed from father to son alone and the characteristics of mediocrity from mother to daughter alone deserves a little bit more than silence about the possible genetic paths for that
Never mind that one. I looked for the reference to twice as many foremothers as forefathers, and found it after some work. It plunged me into evolutionary molecular biology in which I have the skills of a baby, but the study Baumeister probably used as his source is this: Genetic Evidence for Unequal Effective Population Sizes of Human Females and Males by Jason A. Wilder, Zahra Mobasher, and Michael F. Hammer, 2004. The study is based on genetic data from 73 unrelated men: 25 African Khoisan, 24 Mongolian Khalks and 24 Papua New Guineans. These three samples are viewed as coming from three separate populations.
The introduction to the study states:
Our knowledge of patterns of genetic variation in the human genome is disproportionately shaped by two loci, the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and the nonrecombining portion of the Y chromosome (NRY). Despite this, relatively few studies have directly compared patterns of DNA sequence variation between these two genomic compartments within human populations. In part, this is because the human NRY has extraordinarily low levels of sequence diversity (Malaspina et al. 1990; Dorit, Akashi, and Gilbert 1995; Hammer 1995; Whitfield, Sulston, and Goodfellow 1995; Jaruzelska, Zietkiewicz, and Labuda 1999; Shen et al. 2000; Sachidanandam et al. 2001), which has made characterization of variation difficult and labor intensive, even at global scales (Underhill et al. 1997). In contrast, mtDNA has proved to be a prolific source of DNA variation, even among very local populations (e.g., Vigilant et al. 1991). The primary cause for these disparate patterns is variation in the spontaneous mutation rate, with base substitutions in mtDNA accumulating approximately an order of magnitude faster than in the NRY (Ingman et al. 2000; Thomson et al. 2000). However, once this difference in mutation rate is taken into account, mtDNA and the NRY should reveal similar evolutionary histories, assuming they are evolving neutrally in a panmictic population with an equal breeding sex ratio. The degree to which these conditions are satisfied, and the extent to which evolutionary forces equally influence mtDNA and the NRY, remain open questions in human evolutionary genetics.
One of the most intriguing observations regarding the evolutionary histories of human mtDNA and Y chromosomes is that they are estimated to have very different times to the most recent common ancestor (TMRCA), with that of mtDNA estimated at 171.5 to 238 thousand years ago (kya) Ingman et al. 2000; Tang et al. 2002) and estimates for the NRY ranging between 46 and 109 kya in recent studies (Pritchard et al. 1999; Thomson et al. 2000; Hammer and Zegura 2002; Tang et al. 2002). Because the TMRCA of a selectively neutral locus is influenced primarily by its effective population size (Ne), the observed disparity between mtDNA and the NRY is somewhat unexpected. These loci are typically assumed to have equal Ne values in neutral evolutionary models and are, therefore, also expected to have similar TMRCAs. Taken alone, however, it is difficult to determine whether the observed difference between mtDNA and the NRY reflects anything more than simple stochasticity in the coalescent process (e.g., Hudson and Turelli 2003). Multilocus comparisons with other portions of the genome, however, indicate that the NRY has significantly less diversity (and, thus, a shorter genealogy) than expected under a standard neutral model (Shen et al. 2000). Although the reasons for this reduction in variation remain unclear, these findings suggest that mtDNA and the NRY may be influenced differently by natural selection or sex-specific demographic processes.
Got it? The idea is to employ various models, assumptions and statistical programs to try to figure out how far back one needs to go to find a common male ancestor in each of the three studied populations (by using the NRY) and how far back one needs to go to find a common female ancestor in each of the three studied populations.
I'm not qualified to discuss whether those processes an assumptions are valid, so keep that in mind. What the study found was that the time to the most recent common male ancestor was roughly half of that to the most recent common female ancestor.
This is the finding which Baumeister translates as the effects of more intense sexual selection on men than on women and the assumption that twice as many women as men have passed their genes on. Because that shared grandpa is so much more recent than that shared grandma, humans have more grandmas than grandpas and the grandpas were the winners. Rather than being the winners of the genetic race, us women are instead viewed as not having evolved very much at all. Sniff.
And it could be the case that more intense sexual competition meant that fewer men than women passed their genes on, especially if those ancient tribal units practiced some amount of polygyny (one man with more than one woman) though that doesn't prove, in itself, that the men who succeeded in passing their genes on were all those wonderful things Baumeister dreams about. But there are, in fact, alternative theories for the findings.
It may not be sexual selection which caused that difference (assuming the difference remains verified in future studies) but simply natural selection:
A leading hypothesis to explain the comparatively recent ancestry of the human NRY is that positive directional selection has played a strong role in shaping nucleotide diversity in this compartment of the genome (Malaspina et al. 1990; Dorit, Akashi, and Gilbert 1995; Whitfield, Sulston, and Goodfellow 1995; Jaruzelska, Zietkiewicz, and Labuda 1999; Pritchard et al. 1999). Because it is non- recombining and haploid, the NRY acts as a single locus that may be particularly prone to periodic diversity-reducing selective sweeps (e.g., Maynard Smith and Haigh 1974; Begun and Aquadro 1992).
Luca Cavalli Sforza and Marcus Feldman proposed that explanation in 2003 (The Application of Molecular Genetic Approaches to Human Evolution)
Or it could be stochastic, as Rosalind Harding and Gil McVean proposed in 2003 (A structured ancestral population for the evolution of modern humans)
Finally, the effect could also be caused by patrilocal "marriage" customs which have been the most common form. This means that it is women who move when entering "marriage" (or whatever long-term mate contracts were called), not men. Over time the population will show much more variety in the mitochondrial DNA (which is inherited solely from the mother) than in NRY (which men inherit only from their fathers) because the population builds itself on the basis of related males and unrelated females who came from outside the group. This differential variety would produce the same apparent time to the most recent common ancestor results.
I hope I got some of that right! The point is that a statement I recently saw somewhere stating that it is definitely proved that twice as many women as men have passed their genes on (DNA!) isn't quite so definite inside evolutionary molecular biology than it is inside the evolutionary psychology amateurs' understanding.
It's hard for me to know if the studies I found give the most recent views. But that's not really what my task here has been. It has been to show that it always pays to ask how someone knows what they say they know. Always verify!
Monday, 11 February 2013
We should talk more about incentives in politics and in policies. For example, the US system of tying health insurance to employment creates some very bad incentives. Like these:
As part of his state’s new budget, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) and his administration are trying to force potentially tens of thousands of public sector employees in the state to work fewer hours so that the government can avoid providing them health care.It's in the interest of an organization to do that, and it's more in the interest of profit-focused private firms than the public sector, though McDonnell demonstrates that even the latter will join the cost-cutting train.
The bad incentives here have to do with manipulating hours of work to avoid paying for health insurance. Other bad incentives of the employment-tied US health insurance system abound. The latest of them is that religious thing about employers trying to have a say over what type of health care the insurance policies should cover, to avoid funding contraceptives. Thus, health insurance becomes something affecting working conditions and also something other people's ethical values determine, in a fairly non-democratic way.
If health insurance was not tied to employment we wouldn't have so many things to argue about or the kinds of manipulations we are witnessing here, and firms wouldn't be so reluctant to hire older workers with potentially higher health care costs.
Something fun happened in Oregon.
But anyway, a few pro-gun demonstrators entered the Oregon Capitol building brandishing assault rifles:
A few hundred pro-gun demonstrators rallied outside the Oregon state Capitol on Friday to protest efforts to enact gun safety laws. A handful of protesters also entered the Capitol building itself and brandished assault rifles and other guns in the Capitol rotunda:The Wild, Wild West. But wait, there's more! In Arkansas, some churches may soon allow concealed carry in churches which agree to it:
- In Arkansas, CNN reports, a measure permitting concealed carry of guns in churches has passed the state House of Representatives, and it seems likely to become law. The revision to the statute declares a state of emergency and notes that “a person should be allowed to carry a firearm in a church that permits the carrying of a firearm for personal security.”
- This seems about right. If I have one complaint when I go to church, it is that it is not nearly enough like the Wild West. You’d better keep that sermon under 10 minutes. “Please do not shoot the piano player,” read Oscar Wilde’s favorite sign in a Western saloon. “He is doing his best.” No doubt some variant of this will be required.
- In fact, I can think of some other changes that need to be made to the churches to accommodate the guns. “Thou shalt not kill” should go. Replace it with “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Just as catchy, and more relevant to the situation at hand.
The medieval churches of Finland had weapon rooms where people left their weapons before entering, which makes me feel weird about the idea of people having guns inside the church today.
At this rate there is a market for shower holsters for guns. If nowhere is safe then everywhere one must be armed, right?
Yesterday I had the weirdest Internet day: Venturing into places where I'm the Antichrist and mostly by accident! Two of the sites had to do with Neo-Hitlerites (my term for racists who kinda like Hitler or think he was just misunderstood and who also hate Jews, blacks and women). I was somewhat surprised by the fact that these guys are not only obsessed with race and the establishment of a White Homeland and all sorts of very, very nasty stuff. They are also utterly into the oppression of women and telling us our proper role!
This makes sense, of course. If you want to create a mega-country with only white people in it you need to get white women to start breeding to the maximum. Women are the cannons and babies are the cannon balls and the soldiers operating the cannons must be these race-separatist men. And cannons don't go to college or steal jobs from men.
One site told me, quite seriously, that feminism is a Jewish plot to make all non-Jews go extinct. Its purpose is the destruction of the family which results in low birth rates, single mothers who cannot cope and so on. The solution, it seems, is for men to man-up, grab women by the next and grind their faces into the dirt. She likes it. She really does, because evolution made woman interested in only two things: pleasing the man and having as many babies as possible. Men, on the other hand, are created Leaders by evolution! All white men, that is. -- Don't you just love the various theories of our evolution people feel free to present, these days?
Anyway, this site told me that women should be at home caring for children because that's what evolution created women for. Because women are so emotional, men should make all decisions except those about children. I find it hilarious when we get a whole story how all unequal arrangements are to benefit the children and then men would leave that most precious cause for existence to be decided over by the terribly emotional women!
While scrubbing my eyes with steel wool in the shower I contemplated the fact that the story that site told about women is identical to the story extreme Islamists tell about women which is identical to the story fundamentalist Christians tell about women. But in some ways this site seems more honest because the writer doesn't even pretend that any of this is for the benefit of women. Cannons.
So after disinfecting myself thoroughly and repeating the mantra "only a few rotten apples", I strayed onto a very similar but smarter site from a YouTube video of this Superbowl ad, because the site sent a commando unit of misogynists to take over the comments thread. They really do hate us! Especially feminists because feminism stands in the way of the Dominant Alpha Wolf Getting His Way. Which is pretty funny, given that alpha wolves don't seem to exist in the wild. They are family guys.
Anyway, these asshats were so nasty and dehumanizing that I wanted to see who their daddy is. He's a Nationalist, he tells us, meaning that he is not racist but just wants all races to have their own countries and besides, Hitler was badly misunderstood. He wants to abolish the Nineteenth Amendment because he believes that women's suffrage destroyed the White Family though he admits that it most likely won't get abolished.
He also wants to ban women from becoming physicians (I was too tired to find out why but suspect it's too high a role for women). And he is opposed to abortion, thinks homosexuality is a disease caused by early childhood homosexual abuse and so on. Interestingly, he seems to have joined the misogynists openly not because he would feel strongly about the perfidy of women as a sex but because his plan for a White Homeland requires taking away women's human rights. Cannons, again.
And no, I'm not linking to either site. And yes, I had to do the steel wool operation again.
There's something very wrong about me because the third piece I read was on the Fox News website, titled "To Be Happy, We Must Admit Women And Men Aren't "Equal."" Suzanne Venker's piece has snippets such as this
- It’s time to say what no one else will: Feminism didn’t result in equality between the sexes – it resulted in mass confusion. Today, men and women have no idea who’s supposed to do what.
-
- Prior to the 1970s, people viewed gender roles as as equally valuable. Many would argue women had the better end of the deal! It’s hard to claim women were oppressed in a nation in which men were expected to stand up when a lady enters the room or to lay down their lives to spare women life. When the Titanic went down in 1912, its sinking took 1,450 lives. Only 103 were women. One-hundred three.
-
- Compare that with last year’s wrecked cruise line, the Costa Concordia. It resulted in fewer deaths, but there was another significant difference. “There was no ‘women and children first’ policy. There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboats. It was disgusting,” said passenger Sandra Rogers, 62.
-
- The captain of the ship agrees. In USA Today, Francesco Schettino was asked about his New Year’s resolution. He responded, “Bone up on the parts about ‘women and children first’ and ‘the captain goes down with his ship.’
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
.jpg)
